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Joseph Lieberman writes with Gametunnel's monthly round-up of quality independent games. Taking the top honors this month is Caster, a fast-paced shooter with weapon upgrades and a partially destructible environment. "The weapons are a nice variety: homing, stun, and charge lasers, along with two lasers that create chasms and mountains in the environment. The last two are personal favorites of mine (screwing with the terrain is great fun). Fighting is sweet, sweet pandemonium, but it can be slightly overwhelming at first. By the second or third level, though, you'll be blasting the baddies like a pro." Also scoring high were Zeno Clash, a fighting game with elements of a shooter, and Geneforge 5: Overthrow (the last in the series of Geneforge games), a point-and-click RPG with turn-based combat.

Indie is a really undefined term that orginally meant "not published by the major publishers" but nowadays noone's really sure what's indie and what's not. Is it indie to get published by Valve? Does indie just require funding your own development (again Valve or maybe The Conduit could apply here)?

However this is just about the games released in April, The Maw got released in January or so on XBLA.

Indie comes from independent, as in not controlled by a major publisher. It would be the opposite of mainstream. Also mind you that the creating process is not the essential here, the distribution is, as the distributer (producer) generally controlls and funds the project. That's the best definition I can give you. But as everything there are grayzones.

I guess Settlers can be considered an RTS since it's really about building up a war economy and crushing the opposition, never mind the more recent derailings the franchise got... Maybe many people just don't know about games like Settlers? The genre hasn't seen much attention lately.

I guess Settlers can be considered an RTS since it's really about building up a war economy and crushing the opposition, never mind the more recent derailings the franchise got... Maybe many people just don't know about games like Settlers? The genre hasn't seen much attention lately.

The original Settlers, up to Settlers 4, are great games. A more recent game in the same genre that I enjoy is Anno 1701 [wikipedia.org]

Nah, the jumping & movement just feels really inconsistent. While I'm badmouthing the game, the performance is also pretty bad. I get better frame rates in half-life 2. Again, all this is under Wine (as I mentioned above) so if it isn't performant because it's running under Wine... I don't care, because I'm a Linux user:P

(Mod me down if you find the view of a Linux gamer irrelevant or whatever, right?)

Oh, I don't find it irrelevant. I find it kind of important, actually. However, one should consider WINE a poor substitute for doing the real thing- if it's not got a native Linux version, perhaps you shouldn't be using it under WINE... (If you're wondering, this is the position I've held for a while- and I am actively doing something about that...:-D) unless you're like me and trying to find new titles to move from Windows to Linux.

Jumping and movement's not inconsistent with the native version (Well,

Zeno Clash is an interesting take on the fighting genre as it is entirely first person and done in the HL2 engine (it appears). There are some weapons but using them is intentionally clunky as to push the fighting control. While the game oozes with style and has an absolutely outstanding new world filled with things you have never seen before... I can't help but feel the game just doesn't work for two reasons.

First) The control with the keyboard sometimes borders on frustrating. All the keys make sense and the placement seems logical but as they game moves quite fast in sections you really feel limited compared to a traditional fighter. Perhaps with a joypad it works more smoothly?

Second) The difficulty ramp is insane. You'll find yourself getting past the first encounter easily enough as it is there to introduce the game to you. However very early on you encounter a battle that is easily 10 times harder... we are talking like 5 minutes later here. You don't get a chance to get really used to the engine and as it is pretty easy to die when fighting multiple foes because of the first person perspective (you can't easily tell where everyone is or damage is coming from) it can just be... frustrating and one must really want to play to get over this hump.

Fortunately each of these issues is fixable and I'd expect a patch or the next iteration to play much better.